READING PACKCUSTOMER INVOLVEMENT DETAILED STRATEGY 2016/19

Draft Community and Resident Engagement Strategy 2019 'Working with residents and local people to shape and prioritise our services’

1. Introduction

Homes for Haringey is committed to meet the highest standards in delivering services to the residents. Our new 5 year business plan sets out key priorities, focusing on our customers and committing to developing greater opportunities for resident involvement and feedback. There is commitment to ensure that residents are more widely engaged in shaping our services. 2,000 residents responded to the consultation in summer 2017 to inform on the priorities for the current 5-year business plan.

The strategy contributes to our vision - “Housing is about people and communities, not just bricks and mortar. This means mixed and inclusive neighbourhoods where residents can lead happy and fulfilling lives.” The strategy sets out the key objectives and priorities over the next three years aimed at putting residents at the heart of our service. We want Homes for Haringey residents to be involved in shaping, checking, challenging and prioritising our services to ensure that they meet the varied needs of the community. This is particularly needed to adapt to changes in the public and housing sector with emphasis on achieving cost savings through collaborative work with our residents and the wider community.

The revised strategy re-enforces our commitment to genuine partnership with residents and our local communities especially as the Housing sector was greatly criticised as not being attentive to residents following the Grenfell fire. The recently published ‘new deal for social housing’ paper identified the need to tackle stigma associated with residents living in social housing and celebrating residents’ work in their communities.

We will build on our work with residents in complying with the regulatory framework to hold us to account through scrutiny to ensure effective prioritisation of our services. This is particularly important as there is continued drive to achieve value for money with reduced resources. The strategy applies to current and future residents and to people in our local communities to whom we provide a service to.

2. Background and Context

The revised strategy has incorporated the outcome of various consultations and reviews of key aspects of our current engagement strategy and structures since the summer of 2017. This will build on our strong base of engagement channels. This includes a very strong Resident Scrutiny Panel, a Residents Complaints Panel and significant resident representation on the Homes for Haringey Board. Others are the tenure-specific improvement Forums, local residents’ associations, resident Advocates and local resident service monitors. There are also community development and youth engagement programmes. There is still room for more improvement as there are gaps that have been identified in service reviews.

The principles and themes of the current strategy (section 4) are still relevant, but we need better ways of measuring their success and impact. This is reflected in our revised Value for Money Strategy and relevant frameworks are being developed.

Homes for Haringey Ltd Draft Revised Community and Resident Engagement Strategy

Below is the summary of the consultation and reviews involving a wide range of residents from all tenures.

Feedback from the consultation on the new HfH’s 5 year business plan – July to October 2017 and 2,000 respondents received. The feedback received covered the perception of residents on whether their views are listened to; whether to continue to have tenure specific channels of engagement and other preferred communication channels. These feedback have been used to inform engagement and communication programmes from 2018/19. This includes consultation and set up of tenure specific forums; recognition of Borough-wide groups and introduction of more outreach programmes to improve visibility of Homes for Haringey in the community.

Statutory and regulatory framework on tenant involvement/empowerment standard. This includes the principles of co-regulation by tenants. This continues to be a strong aspect of resident engagement by Homes for Haringey. There are 4 residents elected on the board and a strong Resident Scrutiny Panel who continue to review key areas of services and feeding into service improvement plans. The Resident Scrutiny panel has a co-opted member on the board’s risk and audit committee.

Feedback from independent review of our resident engagement work by TPAS between February and May 2018 using their national engagement standard. This involved desktop review as well as focus group discussions involving 40 residents and 20 staff drawn from across the business.

Review of Recognition criteria and support to Resident groups – Over 60 residents attended focus group discussions. Resident Associations’ new recognition criteria and relevant documentations consulted and agreed with implementation from April 2019. The Borough-wide recognition documentation review continuing with the 2 recognised groups.

Audit of all Resident Associations completed and development plan in place to work with them to be more self-sufficient.

Review of existing panels and introduction of Tenure specific-forums – focus groups for residents/leaseholders attended by over 90 residents between May and June 2018. Over 300 respondents to questionnaires.

‘Snack and chat’ sessions at 6 locations between May and June 2018 – over 200 residents engaged to provide feedback on priority topics for forums.

Summer road shows at 3 locations between August and October 2018 – over 400 residents engaged.

4. Key Principles/Themes and how they will be achieved

4.1 More engagement choices to reach a wider range of residents and people in our communities

We want to provide the different opportunities available for all our residents to become involved and we want to use a variety of ways to reach diverse groups.

We have a very diverse borough with people from many cultures, backgrounds and age groups. We offer a wider range of ways for people to engage with us and aim to make sure the profile of residents who are involved reflects our wider residents.

We closely monitor residents at different levels of involvement to ensure our opportunities are inclusive. In addition to our current ways of hearing residents' views, we always work towards more ways people can engage with us if they wish to such as using digital technology. This way residents can talk to us if they want to, in ways and at times that suit them. A range of options for involvement are listed in Appendix A.

We will do more outreach work in neighbourhoods to improve on our visibility and pick up issues directly from residents and deal with them promptly. This will

Homes for Haringey Ltd Draft Resident Engagement Strategy Page 2 of 8

enable us to build more genuine partnership with residents and jointly find solutions to issues. We will use the various outreach programmes like ‘road shows’, ‘staff on site’ ward walk about’ and various community/partnership events to engage hard-to-reach residents.

We will continue to build on the use of digital technology e.g. texts, website voting, Twitter and mobile phone “apps” (applications). We will maximise options for residents to use ‘Seemydata’, an on-line package that lets residents see details about their own tenancy, rent account, etc. We continue to increase engagement on-line, including development support to our resident digital champions. They will help people in the wider community settings to use the internet. We will develop further the housing “app”. This makes giving feedback on our services and sharing views easier. It also means that more residents, who may not be able to attend meetings and events, can also, if they wish influence, prioritise and improve our services.

4.2 Continuous service Improvement through residents’ scrutiny

We want residents and people who use our services to be able to help us to make the best use of our resources. We want to ensure that we continue to improve services and avoid duplication.

We will continue to support the Resident Scrutiny Panel to carry out independently in-depth review of services, and implement actions. We will ensure that the work of the Panel is promoted widely as well as the impact their review and recommendations have on service improvement. Continuing to publish their work will ensure increased transparency and raise the profile and attract new members. Work is already on the way to attract new members from a wide range of background during the next recruitment round. (Detailed Terms of Reference and application forms to apply for membership are available on our website as well as their impact assessment reports.) Developing further the ‘Friends of Scrutiny’ will be a main focus for 2019/20 onwards as it will enable more opportunities for more residents to be involved in reality checking of our services.

We will work on involving resident in procurement of contractor/s and the monitoring of those contracts.

Residents are included in the recruitment process of key roles. We will build on the use of the co-production approach to service review which

we have started in our Support and Well-Being Service. We review the work of the Resident Complaints Panel in the light of any

recommendations from ‘the new deal for social housing’ consultation on the role of such panel as a ‘designated person’. The purpose is to achieve consistently an effective and swift complaint resolution.

We will report widely to residents the key performance indicators for services they receive and how their feedback has helped in improvements.

We want to hear from residents which service area should attract more resources from the overall budget.

4.3 Making the most of our residents and local peoples' skills and potential

We want to provide residents with support to develop skills so they can influence services as well as improve their quality of life.

There have been changes in the housing and welfare areas like the introduction of Universal Credit to our residents. These affect residents and we will help them to cope with the changes. We will continue to build on the successful community development and financial inclusion work. This includes training opportunities to improve employment chances as well as providing benefit entitlement advice. Support, information and advice will be provided to meet the general challenges of welfare reform as it affects individual households.

We will develop our digital inclusion plan to ensure as many residents as possible have the skills to engage with us, access services and maintain their

Homes for Haringey Ltd Draft Resident Engagement Strategy Page 3 of 8

own support networks through digital technology. The training of resident digital champions will be expanded further to provide basic training to other residents at local venues, including the Support and Well Being lounges.

We will build on our community and economic development activities run in partnership with statutory and voluntary organisations in our neighbourhoods and maximise the use of community space. We have brought some community facilities back into use in partnership with local residents. These activities include environmental/community gardening, health, benefits, energy saving schemes, parent programmes, keep-fit, coffee mornings, community safety etc. Through Project 2020 and other training and employment programmes we are helping to engage young people in our activities as well as supporting these residents to get back to work. We will help make it easier for other employment and training organisations to bring in additional services to our residents through formal strategic partnerships.

Our most valuable asset is our residents, especially those who voluntarily help their communities in a range of ways. This is a positive aspect of our work as we have hundreds of volunteers in the community who we value their work and recognise their contribution. We will support our residents to build on these skills so that there are more community leaders who have a voice to influence services e.g. safety, fighting crime, and poverty prevention initiatives e.tc. These provide valuable transferable skills and experiences that could help them in gaining employment or accessing other learning and training opportunities. We will continue to support residents who want to develop new skills so they can more effectively help residents in their neighbourhoods.

4.4 Support for residents’ groups

We want to focus our support for groups. This will help empower them to deliver projects that bring clear and direct benefits to residents and local communities. These groups can become focal points for celebrating the community.

We will continue to provide practical support to our formal and informal resident groups. The implementation of the development plan for each local Resident Association will be progressed further. Our support will include individual and group training, capacity building, advice, information and signposting for external funding to complement the grant they receive from Homes for Haringey. Other support will include offering advice on holding events and help them achieve their objectives.

We will promote shared learning and success to residents and stakeholders to encourage the development of good practice. Promote the success of the work of our residents locally and nationally. We have a lot of examples of activities led by residents that are making a positive difference including environmental/community gardening, health, keep-fit, Bar-B-Q, fun days, etc.

We will continue to build on the success of our community development programme. These activities should lead to the engagement of more diverse groups.

4.5 Embed resident engagement as part of our core business

We want to involve residents in shaping all our services.

We will ensure all teams engaging directly with residents develop ways for residents to influence and improve services and solve local issues. For instance the work of our resident scrutiny panel has led to improvement in those services reviewed (e.g. winter planning, responsive repairs, complaints, and customer access and engagement etc.).

We will support teams to provide more ways for residents to get involved and ensure residents shape policy reviews and service improvement. The new tenure specific forums are avenues to gather feedback and share improvement for different services. We have resident monitors and advocates who play a key

Homes for Haringey Ltd Draft Resident Engagement Strategy Page 4 of 8

role in providing feedback on the quality of services and they influence positive change in service delivery.

We will build resident engagement into all overall service plans and team plans and have resident engagement champions in each service area.

We will promote cross team working by our staff to ensure residents receive a holistic and joined-up service.

We will build on our partnership work with the various Council teams to ensure we and share annual work plans for enhance joint up work.

4.6 Monitoring and Measuring Success of the Strategy

In addition to capturing the impact from community and resident engagement through our Value for Money Strategy, We always find best ways to measure and promote our progress in meeting these objectives, through:

developing clear action plans with performance indicators to enable us measure the social return on investment. We will build on the pilot done in 2017/18 and embed the approach.

reviewing involvement activities for impact, effectiveness, popularity, access and diversity and value for money.

developing a company-wide data base to capture information – in particular the numbers of residents involved at various levels, and a profile broken down by the different diversity strands of our residents so we can tell how well we are enabling engagement for all our residents.

reporting resident engagement programmes and impacts through social media, the Homes for Haringey website, through newsletters, and notice boards using the 'you said - we did' format.

establishing a system of recording and using resident testimonials as part of the communication process. If residents see what has worked in other areas, it may inspire them to get involved to improve things where they live too. In the same way, they might get some new ideas for things that could be done where they live, from seeing successful projects happening in other areas.

providing quarterly reports widely through the tenure specific Forums, website and bi-annually to the Board. We will have an annual review of the Engagement Strategy and its action plan by a group drawn from a wider resident base and a resident board member.

5. Resource Implications

We will ensure that Resident Engagement continues to be part of Homes for Haringey's core business as well as using Information Technology to widen engagement by residents. Although HfH has seen an improvement in its digital offer, this needs further investment. This includes extending the service connect tool for instant feedback to more services; exploring the provision of digital engagement platforms and increased digital engagement through social media. Both HfH website and internal management systems need to be updated and modernized to ensure they are interactive and capture the right data to help continuous service improvement. This is an area we significantly need to strengthen, develop and invest in to ensure we have a digital platform that is fit for the future and fits the needs of residents who do not want to / do not have the time to engage with us in other ways. Investment is needed in automating processes to ensure officer time is spent efficiently.

The proposed approach to move to more digital interaction will be more cost efficient and less resource intensive, whilst optimising the impact and range of engagement. Better knowledge of our customers and their likely needs will help us to act earlier, reduce complaints and improve users’ satisfaction.

6. Equality and Diversity

Homes for Haringey Ltd Draft Resident Engagement Strategy Page 5 of 8

Our approach to resident engagement is committed to equality of opportunity for all and to respect the needs of our diverse communities in service delivery. This is in line with Homes for Haringey’s Equality and Diversity Policy.

The revised Resident Engagement Strategy aims to continue to widen our offer to residents and suggest a variety of ways to reach diverse groups. In the last 18 months, there has been more awareness around Dementia, Mental Health, LGTB+, and Domestic Violence for staff. The issue of under-engagement of residents who are younger (below the age of 30); older (over 55) and living in general-needs housing will hopefully be addressed by investment in the technology to enable more digital engagement. We will monitor who is involved and ensure it reflects the profile of Homes for Haringey’s residents. The revised arrangements contain proposals to address this disproportion of engaged residents, and also contain arrangements for regular monitoring and review of engagement take-up. By this means impact can be reviewed periodically and adjustments made as required.

Homes for Haringey Ltd Draft Resident Engagement Strategy Page 6 of 8

Appendix A: Current Involvement Channels

Resident Board membersResident Scrutiny PanelResident Complaints Panel

Resident AssociationsResident Digital ChampionsResident Advocates and Estate Monitors

Leasehold Improvement ForumSupported Housing Improvement ForumTemporary Accommodation Improvement ForumGeneral Needs Improvement Forum

Task and Finish GroupsFocus Groups Mystery Shoppers/Friends of ScrutinyFeedback Surveys – paper, telephone and survey monkey etc.

Roadshows/Fun Days/ Outreach eventsFire Safety eventsYouth programmes

Homes for Haringey Ltd Draft Revised Community and Resident Engagement Strategy

Homes for Haringey Ltd Draft Revised Community and Resident Engagement Strategy

Time spent2 - 5 minutes

5 - 10 minutes5 - 10 minutes

10 - 15minutes

5 - 10 minutes5 - 10 minutes

10 - 15 minutes

10 - 15minutes1 – 3 hours1 – 3 hours3 – 4 hours

2 hours2 – 3 hours

varied

2 – 3 hours1 – 2 hours

1 – 2 hours

2 – 3 hours(more for portfolio

holders)